San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal court on Friday to order the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release more thorough information about the dragnet electronic surveillance being conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA). The filing in EFF's long-standing case, Jewel v. NSA, also argues that the DOJ must stop pretending that information revealed and publicly acknowledged about government surveillance over the last seven months is still secret.

"The government has now publicly admitted much about its mass spying, but its filings before the court still try to claim broad secrecy about some of those same admissions," EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said. "It's long past time for the Department of Justice to stop using overblown secrecy claims to try to prevent an open, adversarial court from deciding whether the NSA's spying is constitutional."

Since the Jewel case was first filed in 2008, the government has used claims of state secrets to fight court review. Last year, documents revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden confirmed many of the case's allegations. As a result of the Snowden disclosures, Judge Jeffrey White of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ordered the government to review all of its filings and release everything that was no longer secret. The court also ordered the government to explain the effects of the disclosures on the case. The DOJ filed its response on December 20, releasing eight, still-heavily redacted, declarations. The government also submitted new declarations, but those declarations largely ignored, and failed to explain the impact of, the flood of new information concerning the NSA's surveillance operations revealed through the press, congressional hearings, or the administration's website icontherecord.tumblr.com.

In our response, EFF argues that the DOJ did not comply with the judge's order and that the agency's submissions fell far short of an accurate and comprehensive presentation of the facts—especially with regard to the "upstream" program where the NSA accesses communications as they flow across the Internet backbone, the participation of AT&T in NSA surveillance, and the lack of demonstrated effectiveness of the bulk collection programs.

"The court ordered the government to review for release all previously secret filings in this case, yet there are still secret documents in the record," EFF Staff Attorney Mark Rumold said. "We at least deserve an explanation for why we can't have access to those documents. Our plaintiffs, as well as the general public, have a right to know what the government has been telling the court in secret."

EFF has presented its full evidentiary case that the five ordinary Americans who are plaintiffs in Jewel v. NSA were among the hundreds of millions of nonsuspect Americans whose communications and communications records have been touched by the government’s mass surveillance regimes. This presentation includes a new...

In the United States, a secret federal surveillance court approves some of the government’s most enormous, opaque spying programs. It is near-impossible for the public to learn details about these programs, but, as it turns out, even the court has trouble, too. According to new opinions obtained by EFF last...

UPDATE September 14, 2018: This blog has been updated at the bottom to include information about two Senators’ reactions to the NSA’s call detail record deletion. In late June, the NSA announced a magic trick—hundreds of millions of collected call records would disappear. Its lovely assistant? Straight from the agency’s...

Agron Hasbajrami is a U.S. resident who was arrested at JFK airport in 2011 on his way to Pakistan and charged with providing material support to terrorists. Although the government used Section 702, its warrantless Internet surveillance authority, to build its case against Hasbajrami, it withheld this fact from his...

Two reporters recently identified eight AT&T locations in the United States—towering, multi-story buildings—where NSA surveillance occurs on the backbone of the Internet. Their article showed how the agency taps into cables, routers, and switches that handle vast quantities of Internet traffic around the world. Published by The Intercept...

This week, 24 civil liberties organizations, including EFF and the ACLU, urged Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats to report—as required by law—statistics that could help clear up just how many individuals are burdened by broad NSA surveillance of domestic telephone records. These records show who is calling whom and...

Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, the new nominee to direct the NSA, faced questions Thursday from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about how he would lead the spy agency. One committee member, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), asked the nominee if he and his agency could avoid the mistakes...

Once-secret surveillance court orders obtained by EFF last week show that even when the court authorizes the government to spy on specific Americans for national security purposes, that authorization can be misused to potentially violate other people’s civil liberties.
These documents raise larger questions about whether the government...